Liliaceae

Liliaceae -- the lily family.

The family Liliaceae was first conceived in 1789. At one time, it comprised nearly 300 genera and 4500 species of plants. However, it was long recognized that it included a heterogeneous assortment of genera and was not a unitary whole. While various proposals had been made from time to time to segregate parts of the Lilaceae as smaller, more homomgeneous families, none of these proposals was widely accepted.

In the 1980s, following a variety of proposals for revision of the overall classification of angiosperms, Liliaceae came under more intense scrutiny. In the late 1980s, Kew Botanic Garden, the British Museum (Natural History), and the Edinburgh Botanical Garden formed a joint committee to examine the possibility of breaking up the Liliaceae as far as concerned the arrangement of their herbaria. The committee recommended the following families be used in place of the old, broadly defined Liliaceae:

Note that this specific arrangement of genera in families has been superseded and is not the arrangement used for reference purposes in this wiki. Many of the genera listed are now considered to be in other families.